Sheet material, such paper, fabric, plastic sheeting and the like is typically wound onto paper cores. For example, in the direct mail industry, paper mills wind their stock forms onto paper board cores for shipment to a direct mail printing facility. The forms come in various sizes; generally 25,000 forms or pages per roll. The press department then punches pin feeds into the paper. The press department then prints anything that may be consistent on the form such as letter head or form numbers for any given customer. During this process the form is unwound from the shipped roll and then wound onto another paperboard core. The core that came with the paper is customarily discarded when there is still some paper left on it . . . any where from 1″ to 3″ thickness of paper and then the core and paper is customarily discarded.
After the press punches pin feeds, prints letter head and rewinds the sheet forms, the roll is transferred to the laser printing department where the roll is unwound and rewound onto yet another core during the personalization process. (Names, addresses, phone numbers, letter information, etc.)
A direct mail facility that produces between 30 or 40 million names/addresses per month goes through between approximately 2,500 to 3,500 cores that are thrown into bins for recycling. Furthermore, there are more than 2,000 rolls with cores on the production floor waiting to go through the process at any given time.
Currently, winding cores are made of paper board and paper products. Their reuse is limited to several times, recycling and/or refurbishing the core so that it can be again used for winding material thereon. Double-sided tape is wrapped around the core in a “candy cane style” to adhere the sheet material to the core. Once the paper is completely wound onto the core, wooden plugs are pounded into the ends of the core to prevent it from collapsing from the weight of the load that was would upon it if the rolled material stays on the core for a considerable amount of time.
There is not found in the prior art a reusable core that will eliminate the need to throw away these rolls.